LukeWrites.com

Newsweek International has published a piece on the Internet outage in China. The article starts:

Jan. 29, 2007 issue - In 1866, the British ship Great Eastern lowered a grappling hook by rope down to the frigid Atlantic Ocean floor far below. Its quarry: a line that had snapped the previous year during one of the first attempts to lay a transatlantic cable connecting the United States with Europe. One hundred and forty years later, repair ships are performing the same task, using essentially the same methods, in the Luzon Strait between Taiwan and the Philippines. They’re trying to snag at least six cables that were damaged in a massive Dec. 26 earthquake off the coast of Taiwan. The mangled cables are out of reach of remotely controlled submersibles often used in such work. By the latest estimates, the task won’t be finished until at least mid-February.

A very interesting but much less compelling paragraph than this gem from OhmyNews:

Last Thursday, repair ships were rushed to the suspected problem spots amid stormy weather in a bid to restore connections to full capacity before the end of February. Crews are working under extremely difficult conditions, with strong winds buffeting the ships before they can get into position for divers to plunge 1000 meters down to the ocean floor to try to retrieve the ruptured ends of the cables and bring them to the surface for testing, splicing and connecting to another ruptured end.

But the diving and retrieval method could be very dangerous and might cost some of the divers their lives, since the area is teeming with carnivorous sharks and other deadly marine life. So some of the outfits, like the Global Marine repair group, are resorting to tried and tested solutions like dredging the sea to fix the problem. Global Marine repair ships are manned by 50 mostly British officers and crewmen and in the past months, before the major disaster caused by the quake, they were busy fixing cables, which are often damaged by fishermen and submarines.

Anyway, the Newsweek article (which is the first coverage I’ve seen in the Western media) doesn’t give any new repair predictions.

Changchun’s internet is working faster today, although all services still aren’t working.

Technorati Tags: cables, Taiwan, carnivorous sharks and other deadly marine life, Changchun, China, internet